Move more – it's health advice whittled down to its simplest two-word form (see also: eat less, sleep well, chill out, get fibre, don't smoke).
But while increasing the amount of time you spend exercising is a surefire way to improve a raft of biomarkers linked to a long and healthful life, it’s not just about volume.
It turns out the variety of exercise and movement you get also leads to bodily benefits.
In January 2026, scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health published the results of research 30 years in the making.
Researchers followed 110,000 people over three decades and found that those who did the greatest variety of exercise enjoyed some of the greatest rewards.
People who mixed up their exercise regime were not just healthier than those who stayed sedentary; they were also 19 per cent less likely to die during that period compared with people who stuck to one kind of activity.
Imagine a pair of twins who both exercise for six hours per week (the NHS target guideline for moderate exercise, by the way).
One twin spends two hours running, two hours doing resistance training and two hours doing yoga. The other spends six hours running. According to this analysis, the twin who does an assortment of sweat sessions is more likely to outlive the other.
“A working theory is that different types of activities may confer distinct health benefits,” says Dr Yang Hu, lead author of the study.
“An example is that strength training and aerobic activities focus on improving different domains of body health and may have different effects on lipids, blood pressure and insulin sensitivity.”
As well as overall mortality, the study found that people with the greatest variety of exercise also had a lower risk of dying specifically from the biggest killers, like cardiovascular disease, cancer and respiratory disease.
This is in line with what exercise science has shown us for years. “Our data and most other population-based studies have consistently shown that the health benefits of physical activity are long-term and cumulative,” says Hu.
We should point out that this wasn’t a randomised controlled trial, but an observational study using long-term population data. In other words, nobody was confined to a lab for 30 years to find out which kind of exercise is best for humanity.
Observational trials aren’t as strong as randomised trials, but the findings of this study resonate with other, older discoveries.
For example, researchers at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada compared aerobic, resistance and combined training on a group of people with obesity.
They found that for simultaneously improving participants’ insulin resistance and functional abilities, the combined training outperformed both the aerobic work and resistance training on their own.
In their recent work, Hu and his colleagues also looked at different types of exercise to find out whether some bestowed greater advantages than others.
They didn’t compare tennis players with bodybuilders exactly, but they were able to tease out differences between activities.
For example, the people who did the most walking had a 17 per cent lower risk of mortality compared to those who did the least walking. Similarly, experienced runners had a 13 per cent lower risk of mortality compared to people who did the least running.
The paper reported similar numbers for resistance training, jogging, rowing and tennis. Swimming and cycling seemed to have more modest effects.
One of the takeaways from the research is that there isn’t a silver bullet style of exercise for prolonging life. All movement matters.
This echoes previous research that has looked into pick-and-mix approaches to staying fit and healthy. In 2022, the National Cancer Institute in the US compared seven forms of activity in relation to healthy ageing.
Researchers concluded that it didn’t matter how people got their activity – similar benefits were enjoyed by anyone who got the hours in.
Likewise, when exercise programmes are designed for variety, research shows that people’s engagement and motivation increase. It also improves people’s enjoyment of exercise and makes them more likely to stick to an exercise programme.
Yang notes that there may not be a perfect cocktail of exercise. “Our study didn’t aim to prescribe an optimal combination and timing for activities. We believe it should be highly individualised,” he says.
Perhaps that’s the key point. Finding a mix of exercise that you enjoy will keep you motivated and ensure the associated health benefits continue to flow.
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